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Welcome to Kidney101, our website about kidney transplants – more specifically, my wife’s kidney transplant. We are sharing how we found the right treatment and procedure with the hope that our sharing will help the unfortunate one out of every thousand people diagnosed with kidney problems.

Those people with the financial resources and those that are healthy enough will eventually have a transplant. But, having a transplant is not a simple process.

In early 2005, during my wife’s regular Physical Checkup, she found out that she had developed kidney problems. At the end of 2005, we suddenly found out that her kidney’s condition had reached the End-Stage Renal Disease (ESRD) stage.ESRD or kidney failure, occurs when kidney damage becomes so severe that the organs function at less than 10 percent of normal capacity. The kidneys are almost completely unable to help the body excrete waste and regulate bodily fluids.

According to the U. S. Library of Medicine, ESRD most commonly results from long bouts of chronic kidney disease, most often brought on by diabetes. People with ESRD must undergo lifesaving dialysis in which they are hooked up to a machine performing many of the normal kidney functions.

We were unprepared to face this major issue –we were scared: afraid of the consequences of making a bad decision among the many decisions that had to be made – does my wife have an operation, where will it be done, who will do it, who will provide the kidney, how can a match be guaranteed, what is the cost, who will pay for it and so on. We didn’t even know where to begin finding reliable information.

After much research, we discovered that a key decision was where we’d have the operation done. Our choices were:

1.The USA, but the donor waiting list was two to four years long and my wife could not wait that long.

2.Overseas

So our only option was going overseas, but where? China, Thailand, the Philippines? Our doctor directed us to speak with a Filipino lady who recently had a kidney transplant. She told us that her transplant done by Dr. Mora in the Philippines went smoothly, in fact, we were quite impressed with what she told us.

We immediately started the process for arranging my wife’s kidney transplant:

2.We interviewed Dr. Mora and we felt comfortable with him and were satisfied with his diagnosis and plans for the operation

3.After some more thought, we were convinced that going through Dr. Mora was the right choice.

We made a good decision. The process turned out to be much simpler than we thought. After arriving in the Philippines, we met our surgery Team – Dr. Mora, Dr. Casanova, the head surgeon), and Dr. Benito (Chairman) before checking into the hospital.

Over the next week, the hospital staff moved quickly. They completed the work out which included a physical of the heart, lungs, and dental and the pre-transplantation procedure. These steps normally would take two to three months in the United States. By the end of the third week in the Philippines, Dr. Casanova found the perfect donor who had near perfect tissue typing - tissue typing is determined by testing white blood cells which have special "markers" that distinguish "tissue type.” Soon after, my wife had her kidney transplant.

Within a one year after her transplant, she resumed the life she had before her kidney illness. She has returned to work full-time and practices yoga. Our home and family are back to normal.